1. I realized that friendship, comradeship, would never arise in really difficult, life-threatening conditions. Friendship arises in difficult but bearable conditions (in the hospital, but not at the pit face).

  2. I realized that the feeling a man preserves longest is anger. There is only enough flesh on a hungry man for anger: everything else leaves him indifferent.

  3. I realized that humans were human because they were physically stronger and clung to life more than any other animal: no horse can survive work in the Far North.

  4. I saw that the only group of people able to preserve a minimum of humanity in conditions of starvation and abuse were the religious believers, the sectarians (almost all of them), and most priests.

  5. Party workers and the military are the first to fall apart and do so most easily.

  6. I saw what a weighty argument for the intellectual is the most ordinary slap in the face.

Excerpt from “Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag”